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Tag: HPHPc

HipHop was one of the most notable thing came from the Facebook labs about PHP development. PHP is slow and limited. They can’t rewrite theirs entire codebase so they decided to make PHP better. HipHop is a simply PHP to C++ compiler (HPHPc). Converted code is compiled into a binary and performance improvements are about 6x.

Unfortunately HipHop has several downsides. For all the performance gains that HPHPc provided, the curve for further performance improvements had flattened. HPHPc did not fully support the PHP language, including the create_function() and eval() constructs. HPHPc required a very different push process, requiring a bigger than 1 GB binary to be compiled and distributed to many machines in short order.

To overcome these problems Facebook develops, starting from early 2010, the HHVM: a PHP virtual machine. HHVM builds on top of HPHPc, using the same runtime and extension function implementations. HHVM converts PHP code into a high-level bytecode. This bytecode is then translated into x64 machine code dynamically at runtime by a just-in-time (JIT) compiler similarly to C#/CLR or Java/JVM.

Facebook also released Hack, a programming language for HHVM that can be seen as a new version of PHP which it allows programmers to use both dynamic typing and static typing.

Warning: don’t miss a newline character on the last line or linter will fail and you will going to hate this project 😉

Everything works fine. You can add you favorite MySQLhosted service and run your WordPress 5 minutes installation. Almost every plugin seems 100% compatible, I tested most popular with no problem. Performances are better and you also have the opportunity to use Hack to develop new custom plugins.

Now I’m curious about how HHVM can improve my production installations of WordPress. About this I’m looking for an OpenShift cartridge for HHVM or someone want to collaborate to create a new one (the only I found on Github seems “young”). Anyone interested? Let me know!